Cup of Coffee

August 6, 2013: Finally at Home

89 Comments

I've had my regular number of days off and everything, but between the girls being on a long vacation, our housesitting gig and my schedule, this is the first full day I'll have with my kids in our own house in about three weeks. Good thing we got it, too, since school starts in six days.

89 thoughts on “August 6, 2013: Finally at Home”

  1. Woke up this morning to "Operating System Not Found" on my laptop. This is the 4th time this has happened with this machine, though only the first since April 2012. I'm out of warranty, so I think I'm gonna have to replace the HD myself if I can't fix it (I just put an Ubuntu .iso on my flash drive to try to boot from). I'm thinking I'll go with an SSDHD. Any one have experience with them?

    1. Any one have experience with them?
      They're fast. Very fast. They're also far more expensive per GB, so sizes are much smaller. I have a 128 GB SSD in my laptop and haven't had any issues regarding space, but I don't deal with video at all and haven't set up any VM images yet.

      1. I'm not terribly concerned with size. The one I have now is 128 GB, and I'm not real close to filling it up. I'm more concerned about reliability, since I'm really f'in tired of this.

        1. Reliability is a complex thing. Mechanical hard drives ("affectionately" referred to by many as "spinning rust") don't have usage limits and can be written to as much as you want. However, due to having moving parts, they can fail in unpredictable ways. Solid State Drives have no moving parts, eliminating a very common failure mode. However, each flash cell can only be written so many times (in MLC drives, only several thousand times). This is becoming less of an issue due to better wear-leveling, better manufacturing, better support in the OS (i.e. TRIM), and better firmwares. Now, they should last a very long time and if they fail due to wear-leveling, you should still be able to read your data to recover it.

    2. Any one have experience with them?

      What sean said. Blazing fast, but comparatively much more expensive and smaller.

      That said, having the opsys boot up in mere seconds is a fun thing.

    3. Well it boots off the USB stick, so I'm going to try to reinstall the OS on the existing HD. Luckily, I did a backup on Saturday (I guess kicking it off the table turned out to be a good thing ((Though really, I'm convinced this is why it crapped out, so a wash?)) ).

      1. The USB installer detected I have 12.04LTS on my partition already, so that's a bit confusing. I'm running checkdisc right now to figure out what's going on. It seems as though I have an OS with a bad HD sector that isn't allowing the boot process to access it.

            1. Man, this saved me so much aggravation and money that I didn't need to spend. I owe you a beer, at the very least. Where's that Good Guy Sean image?

    1. I think I probably played Oregon Trail as early as 1975 on the MECC system at Spamtown CC (where grampaS taught). Another of the Alma Mater's contributions to kulchur!

    2. That is pretty sweet...I can't recall the last time I played it, but I have it on CD ROM format at home.

      1. Around 2005, we found an Apple 2E someone was trashing and retrieved it before it was gone. Sure enough, Oregon Trail was on it. That would be the last time I played.

        1. I snagged an Apple IIe from the local school district when they were getting of a bunch of their stuff. Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, Odell Lake. Lots of top notch stuff.

          1. What was that make words from a bunch of letters game?
            There was one point after he showed you the cards that he waited for your response. If you didn't give it, he just waited and you could write down a lot of words, to type in once you got the timer. It was fun beating the game.

            I still disagree with word munchers. "Flag" has a long-A sound in a sizable portion of the US. More like flake than flack.

    3. Awesome. I loved playing it on the Apple IIe computers in elementary school. I didn't realize there was a Minnesota/Carleton connection.

      1. Ditto on the former. I did learn eventually what the M in MECC stood for, but could have done without the Carleton mention. Now bS gets another thing to gloat about.

      2. I'm gonna go ahead and hold the opinion that Apple is what it is because of Minnesota.

      1. I see you started early on the 'stache.

        wait, what? Designed after Husker Du?
        httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1sYN0PuRs4

  3. Name the four highest paid players on the Twins' payroll this year/ I'll give you Mauer, Morneau and Wilingham.

    Spoiler SelectShow

    3. Woulda guessed Doumit.
      Except that you made it sound like a trick question, so I might have considered the minors.

      1. Heh, if I'd read the Twins articles I had open in some of my other browser tabs, I'd have nailed this. I'm pretty sure I just ran across where SBG found the inspiration for the question.

    5. Was that a wild billy smith contract extension? If so, is that the last of his transactions that will bear rotten fruit?

  4. You know disdain/despair has long since turned to apathy when the Twins' annual "Position Player Pitches" gets nary a mention in the daily cuppa.

    "I got out pitched by a 38-year-old (actually 39) middle infielder," Correia said. "That's never good. I was just not able to get anybody out."

      2. Isn’t this the third year in a row we’ve seen a position player pitch?

        so, bored with that now, are we? 🙂

        1. Just trying to defend spooky's coffee making skills.

          Really though, three innings pitched, zero runs scored. The Twins need to trade Perkins and have closer by committee with the position players. Get'r done, Billy Smith!

    3. Yeah, sorry. I set up the Cup before it happened.

      On the upside, there's a new hungry joe banner that just went live a handful of minutes ago.

        2. Man do I love me replacement-level relievers.
          None of the current crop really excites me like Doomsday or Hoe-Down did.
          (To say nothing of CJ).

          Hey, I don't think HJ's Hoey version of "World's Greatest" is on that banners page.

        1. That's the most common way I visit Deadspin any more, through an outside link to a specific story (usually from io9.com, since they're partner websites or something). Deadspin does have some good articles, I just don't like wading through the pop culture garbage trying to find actual sports news.

          1. Deadspin does have some good articles, I just don’t like wading through the pop culture garbage trying to find actual sports news.
            Yep. Or wading through their junk sports-culture news to find actual good pop-culture writing.

    2. The biggest double standard of course being that Performance Enhancing Drugs began with the Bash Brothers in the late '80s. If PEDs are such an important criteria for determining eligibility for the Hall of Fame, MLB should be starting an exhaustive historical study of who used them and start tearing down some plaques in Cooperstown.

    1. Thanks for making me google Terry Forster to understand that reference, bS. Also found out he was a really good hitter (especially for a pitcher) and he was born in Sioux Falls, so there's that.

  7. I had a dream where Cheaps and I were on death row. He had gone bananas and thrown grenades at some military planes. I was sentenced to death for not trying to stop him. Our execution was being slowly lowered into a pit of molten lava. I wound up making a convincing argument for us to be let go. I was okay other than some heat stroke, but Cheaps had third degree burns all over his body and would be hooked up to machines for life. Sorry, Cheaps. Should have let you burn.

    2. I assume had you been able to continue your dream that Skynet would definitely go self-aware.

  8. Lots of whining going on about California's new Amber Alert text messaging system.

    I suppose that a lengthy and nasty notification screech is a bit of overkill. I for one didn't really notice the buzzing in the middle of the night, but I was momentarily confused by the presence of the alert on my phone when I checked it this morning. People will get over it, and perhaps this new alert modality will help solve a few abductions more quickly -- or better yet, deter many from happening in the first place.

    1. I think I got one here in Minnesota not long ago. I remember being more confused than annoyed.

      1. I was annoyed about the long buzzing because it made me think someone was calling. After realizing it wasn't, then more intrigued that it was sent.

    1. Rocker is a jerkweed and a racist dick, but I kind of want to make an account specifically to tell 80% of the responders that they're not half so clever as they think they are.

  11. So... following up on previous conversations, NFP still works like a charm.

    But we had a miscarriage.

    1. I am so sorry for your loss. We were fortunate in that area. My sister had several miscarriages after her first child before having her second.

      1. It's fairly remarkable the speed and depth of attachment one can have to a baby. The good news is that there don't seem to be any underlying health issues.

    4. I didn't know what to say to you when you told me earlier, and I don't now. I know the attachment exists well before birth and I've been close enough to loss to know the confusing emotions it brings.

      As long as you two are in this thing together, I trust that you can somehow...do whatever it is people do to get through these things.

      1. Yeah, we're actually doing really well, considering. Philosofette took it harder than I did. It's really just surreal. We knew we were pregnant, and then we weren't. We never even made it to our first doctor's appointment. In some ways it's like we weren't even pregnant, except that we know we were, and had started talking about names and gender and all that stuff.

        We actually have about a half dozen friends and family who have had similar early-term miscarriages over the past few years, so we're well surrounded with understanding and support.

  12. Headlines seen on RSS feed for local newspaper:

    Fontana ranked 15th safest city in nation
    Fontana Lowe's robbed by gunman
    Fontana burglars steal $40,000 in electronics from school

    2. There was an accidental character cutoff.
      First one should have read "Fontana ranked 15th safest city in nation for thieves."

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